Well, now there will never be any question about whether Scripps is political or not. They even made up a graphic to go with the story here. When a prominent scientific organization allows a member to resort to name calling on an issue in an official communications on their website, it cheapens the whole organization.
This appears to be a response to John Coleman’s hour long video special. It was dated the same day as the video release, Jan 14th. Of course, when you read his website at richardsomerville.com you may come to understand that he may not be speaking for everyone there at Scripps. Here’s his page at Scripps. Perhaps the UCSD President might benefit from some communications about the use of his institute to label people with differing views on science.
A Response to Climate Change Denialism
Richard Somerville, a distinguished professor emeritus and research professor at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego, issued the following statement in response to a recent request to address claims recently made by climate change denialists:
1. The essential findings of mainstream climate change science are firm. This is solid settled science. The world is warming. There are many kinds of evidence: air temperatures, ocean temperatures, melting ice, rising sea levels, and much more. Human activities are the main cause. The warming is not natural. It is not due to the sun, for example. We know this because we can measure the effect of man-made carbon dioxide and it is much stronger than that of the sun, which we also measure.
2. The greenhouse effect is well understood. It is as real as gravity. The foundations of the science are more than 150 years old. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere traps heat. We know carbon dioxide is increasing because we measure it. We know the increase is due to human activities like burning fossil fuels because we can analyze the chemical evidence for that.
3. Our climate predictions are coming true. Many observed climate changes, like rising sea level, are occurring at the high end of the predicted changes. Some changes, like melting sea ice, are happening faster than the anticipated worst case. Unless mankind takes strong steps to halt and reverse the rapid global increase of fossil fuel use and the other activities that cause climate change, and does so in a very few years, severe climate change is inevitable. Urgent action is needed if global warming is to be limited to moderate levels.
4. The standard skeptical arguments have been refuted many times over. The refutations are on many web sites and in many books. For example, natural climate change like ice ages is irrelevant to the current warming. We know why ice ages come and go. That is due to changes in the Earth’s orbit around the sun, changes that take thousands of years. The warming that is occurring now, over just a few decades, cannot possibly be caused by such slow-acting processes. But it can be caused by man-made changes in the greenhouse effect.
5. Science has its own high standards. It does not work by unqualified people making claims on television or the Internet. It works by scientists doing research and publishing it in carefully reviewed research journals. Other scientists examine the research and repeat it and extend it. Valid results are confirmed, and wrong ones are exposed and abandoned. Science is self-correcting. People who are not experts, who are not trained and experienced in this field, who do not do research and publish it following standard scientific practice, are not doing science. When they claim that they are the real experts, they are just plain wrong.
6. The leading scientific organizations of the world, like national academies of science and professional scientific societies, have carefully examined the results of climate science and endorsed these results. It is silly to imagine that thousands of climate scientists worldwide are engaged in a massive conspiracy to fool everybody. The first thing that the world needs to do if it is going to confront the challenge of climate change wisely is to learn about what science has discovered and accept it.
— Robert Monroe
Jan. 14, 2010
h/t to WUWT reader Skepshaka
Sou said:
“I honestly thought that many of the posts on here were denying climate change.”
The term “climate change” is a misleading political term for global warming. So what if lots of people fervently believe global warming is bunk? It is easy to do because the tenets kept by the AGW priesthood have more scientific holes than a spaghetti colander.
Please continue to be “honest” with your comments. It means so much.
Did Dr. Somerville get his talking points from Al Gore?
If you really think that “many of the posts on here were denying climate change“, you are either not reading them or lack the scientific background to understand what’s being posted here.
The basic premise of most skeptical arguments is that the climate is always changing… It always has changed and always will change; and that there is nothing anomalous about the nature of the climate changes observed over the last 150 years or so.
The propensity for people like Somerville and Mann to label us as “climate change deniers” or “climate science deniers” is further evidence that anthropogenic global warming has essentially become a religion to them. It’s not adequate for them to argue or debate the scientific issues, they must categorize skeptics as being almost blasphemous by claiming that we deny “climate change” or deny “climate science.”
Earth Science is dominated by the Principle of Non-Uniqueness. That’s why Chamberlain’s Method of Multiple Working Hypotheses is so important in geology and geophysics. For any given set of observations, there are likely to be many models that can explain the observations (multiple working hypotheses). The people who seem to dominate the climate modeling community (Gavin Schmidt, Michael Mann, Jimbo Hansen, etc.) do not have Earth Science backgrounds. They build complex models that seek to find specific relationships… And they generally find the relationships they are seeking. I can easily build valid geophysical models that totally ignore geological reality. I’ve seen people drill very expensive dry holes based on very good geophysical models that ignored geological reality. Models are Garbage-In Garbage-Out. Models can be useful tools of science; but they do not constitute the science itself.
As myopic as the climate modelers are… The IPCC is far worse. The IPCC’s mission is to find anthropogenic causes of climate change. Trying to understand the cause of a phenomenon is science. Trying to find a specific cause of a phenomenon is politics.
Not at Anthony, Peter Plail (05:28:38), but he may well have been having a lend of you.
Anyone who can read and maybe crunch a few numbers can tell you how climate changed in the past.
Anyone can walk outside and tell you what the climate is doing to-day.
It’s the unconscionable alarmist doomsaying pointy heads of any description under the sun who tell you to shut the hell up and pay up, ignorant unqualified denier, because the science is settled on climate change in the future. They’ve been around for yonks. A pox on them.
Unfortunately, Mann does. Otherwise your point was very good.
Mann’s undergrad and first two graduate degrees were in Math & Physics… His second two graduate degrees were from Yale’s Dept. of Geology & Geophysics… I wonder how much course work in geology he took. Yale’s G&G grad programs aren’t exactly geared toward geology…
It’s odd that there are no grad programs in structural geology , sedimentation & stratigraphy, geomorphology, etc.
Based on what he teaches at Penn State and having come from a Math/Physics background, I would guess that Mann’s Geology & Geophysics PhD was probably in the Atmosphere/Oceans/Climate Dynamics program.
On another note… Irrespective of the Hockey Stick and Climategate antics… Mann does have very impressive academic credentials. Masters and doctorates in both physics and “G&G”.
Of course that doesn’t mean that he ever heard of the Principle of Non-uniqueness or Chamberlain’s method.
I guess Yale must put the real geology students into the Tectonics/Surface Processes progam.
SCRIPPS Institution of NEWSPEAK.
so he’s in the ClimateGate emails, he’s worked with James Hansen, and he’s a modellor.
it’s a wrap.
did he come here to play Jesus
to the lepers in his head?
but Mother Nature and ClimateGate won’t let those lepers heal
PaulH (09:42:57) :
That response looks like a copy and paste job from some global warming propaganda sheet from 2001. It makes you wonder if they really believe what they are saying anymore. It’s like they’re living in an echo chamber.
It’s a fervent belief. Feverish. Hot. It boils out of their minds like steam. It’s cooking their brains. It can’t be contained, and has to spill out of their mouths in a heated rush of hot air…
Not A Carbon Cow (17:11:03) :
“Temperature is a measurement of energy…”
Hi, Scott. I think you have hit on an important point, despite the fact that your statement isn’t correct.
First, why it’s wrong, as stated. When calculating the change in total chemical energy of a system, one of the terms involves multiplying the change in entropy (units of energy per degree) by the temperature. In other words, to convert temperature to energy, you need to know more than the temperature. A hot brick contains more energy than the same volume of air at the same temp.
Second. That brings me to why I think what you said is important. The warmers want us to think that temperature, or rather average temperature, is the only measure by which we can tell if the planet is warming. Now, while instantaneous temperature tells you how hot it is now, the temperature history doesn’t tell you anything at all about how hot or cold it will be tomorrow. The averages tell you less, and the deviations from those averages, even less. I think that’s an even bigger “trick” than “hide the decline.”
If you don’t use a frying pan all winter, then use it more and more often all summer, does the fact that it’s average temperature increases mean it is getting hotter, and so you better not now store it near anything flammable, because soon it will be red hot?
Their “temperature anomaly” is just a slight of hand, to get us to focus on an artifact, and one which, by their “adjustments,” they have enhanced. Even without the artificial enhancement it is a meaningless concept, and all the more so with. It’s purpose is to trick us into seeing what isn’t there.
If you look at more detailed plots of temp records you will see that the highs and lows remain about the same, but in some cases the curve broadens and in others it narrows. What that means is that, for a given year, more days are either warmer for broadening or colder for narrowing. That affects the average for the year, but not the max or min, which they have obscured by that “trick.” There is no consistent or significant change in the depth of the troughs or the height of the peaks. They’ve hidden the fact that the pot cools when you take it off the stove.
And, just as the pot cools when you take it off the stove, so it also gets cold at night.
Well this very morning, I heard on my local radio station, an interview with one of the smartest thinkers on this planet. Dr Tmomas Sowell; talking about his new book on ” Intellectuals, and Society.”. He is with the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. Roughly he defined “Intellectuals” as people who produce no testable output. Now he wasn’t being derogatory. He pointed out that Scientists and engineers (and lots of others) submit their output to a simple test; it has to work. So does the plumber’s and the carpenter’s output.
Intellectuals on the other hand put out nothing but ideas; that simply are not testable entities. People may listen to these ideas, and agree or disagree, and other intellectuals may offer their own ideas; but in the end, they are not proposing experiments to test for anything.
In that sense, Sowell believes that Intellectuals can be very dangerous; but he did not assert they all are. Jim Jones clearly was; who knows if Barack Obama is; or if he fits the mold. He certainly hasn’t produced anything that is testable.
However the crux of this story, is that the host asked Sowell if he had drawn any conclusions about the AGW hypothesis; bearing in mind, that he is basically an economist, and not a scientist. Dr Sowell responded immediately that he had rejected the whole notion years ago, as basically unproven silliness. How did he reach that conclusion ?
Well, he said; “any fool can see that if it gets hotter, there is going to be more moisture in the atmosphere which will form more clouds, and those increases in clouds will reflect more sunlight out into space, so It must stop warming in a self regulated fashion. Then he heard that the climate modellers did not even properly account for clouds in their models; so he concluded it was all bunk.
Now it has taken me longer to type what he said than what he said; but how is it that a non scientist but rational thinker like Dr Thomas Sowell can put his finger right on the nub of the problem so quickly with no extensive scientific training.
Way to go Dr Sowell; “it’s the water”. No wonder the good Dr is also one of my heroes too.
PS he also offered that BH Obama is a total failure; but then he knew that long before the man ever got up and proved it himself.
Now it took me much longer than Thomas Sowell to reach the conclusion that AGW theory was pure bunk; but that was because I focussed on the scientific minutiae that seemed to say it had to be so. For Dr Sowell, it simply made no sense; pure and simple, from one of the world’s truly great minds.
George E. Smith (18:47:06) :
“Well this very morning, I heard on my local radio station, an interview with one of the smartest thinkers on this planet. Dr Tmomas Sowell; talking about his new book on ” Intellectuals, and Society.”. He is with the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. Roughly he defined “Intellectuals” as people who produce no testable output“
Carl Sagan, somewhat of pseudoscientist himself, wrote the following about JHU Physicist Robert W. Wood** …
What, then, does one say about those who have a laboratory, and who still can’t, or won’t, get it right?
_______________________________________________________________________
** Note that it was Wood who, in 1909, falsified greenhouse theory. See page 6 here. (if you need, Google Translate should give you a good idea of what’s going on there)
George E. Smith, I would be very interested in any comments you have on my blog about no warming in Abilene, Texas.
http://sowellslawblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/no-warming-from-co2.html
and a smaller followup post at
http://sowellslawblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/abilene-tx-not-impacted-by-global.html
The small towns are showing no warming after more than 100 years. Meanwhile, San Diego is showing a cooling from 1975 til now.
RE MY yonason (17:14:25)
Here’s the link to the Sagan article from which I took that quote.
http://www.godslasteraar.org/assets/ebooks/Sagan_Carl_Does_truth_matter_-_Science_pseudoscience_and_civilization_-_includes_related_articles.pdf
The science is not settled.
How variable is the Sun? Measuring total solar energy flux has not been possible until the past 30 years. The causative forces for the sunspot cycle remain under fierce discussion and dispute. The same can be said for the reversals in magnetic orientation of the Sun. The detection of solar neutrino flux has been a severe test of the theory of nuclear chemistry. I recall “What’s SNU” headlines. The theories of theoretical mass of the theoretically massless neutrino are enough to make one’s head spin. Can a neutrino change its spots (from electron neutrino to muon neutrino)? How can you tell, when the particles in question are so difficult to detect?
Even the allegedly simpler task of measuring solar flux at the surface of the Earth is extremely difficult. You know-clouds, air pollution, instrumental problems-it’s tough if you want 0.01degree C accuracy.
Precisely how would we find proxies for the historical record of solar flux?
As for gravity, now. What is it?
What theory incorporates gravity with the other three standard forces?
Can we make gravity? Can we thin it out?
Where are the gravity waves? Joe Weber tried for years, but his instruments had too much noise to be definitive. Now LIGO experiments are underway.
Considering the degree of uncertainty in our understanding of the Sun and of gravity, to speak of settled science is disingenuous.
And I haven’t even begun on the climate!
yonason (17:14:25) :
Not A Carbon Cow (17:11:03) :
“Temperature is a measurement of energy…”
Hi, Scott. I think you have hit on an important point, despite the fact that your statement isn’t correct.
Yonason,
Yes thank you, you are of course correct. My main point was to emphasize the very small percentage of change we are debating with the believers.
I don’t ever see the point stressed that we should begin temperature measurements at absolute zero, not some arbitrary point (the temp 150 years ago, or whatever we choose to use to smooth our graphs).
As the Earth and seas have always been the Earth and the seas, the heat capacitance of the various components is not a consideration, due to the fact that as a whole, the components don’t change (sure, we get more dust and rocky material from space, but this amounts to little).
The percentage change in energy of the Earth system is very very small and arguably wholly within expected natural variances.
Not A Carbon Cow (16:19:16) :
OK. And, yes, it is disturbing that they deal in degrees C, rather than degrees K, which is really the quantity they should be dealing with, though even then averages aren’t all that meaningful, especially for radiative processes. They are very sloppy, to say the least, which helps them conceal much that they don’t want seen.
I guess there’s not much chance that Somerville will respond here – anyway, the thread is ending – but surely he knows about it!
Mr. Somerville, why not explain yourself? You couldn’t look more foolish than you do, so you have nothing to lose!!